THE TANGLED DIFFICULTIES into which Paul and the Corinthian church had tumbled are matched by the convoluted investigations of those researchers who have tried to figure out exactly what happened next. The second letter to Corinth is not only, as we saw earlier, quite different in style (at least for several chapters) from Paul’s other letters. It is also jerkier in its overall structure, with what appear to be false starts, extra paragraphs injected into the argument, sudden resumptions of earlier themes, and not least a sudden change of mood toward the end, as it goes from the agonized and halting early chapters to a sudden combative, teasing, and upbeat conclusion. As with Galatians, we wish again and again that we could hear the other end of the telephone conversation. Since we cannot, the letter has been a magpie’s nest into which all kinds of bright little theories about Paul, his opponents, his motives, and his theology have been stuffed. Every so often the extraneous collection of oddments needs to be shaken out of the nest, so that the bird can perch there again. Since this book is not the place to engage in the relevant scholarly debates, I propose to take a fresh run at the whole thing and try to maximize the sense the letter makes within the story of Paul as we have been following it.
The starting point must be the mingled sense of shock and relief when Paul was released from prison. (I date this to sometime in middle or late 56.) Imprisonment leaves a lasting scar; we today are sadly familiar with the techniques used to break the spirit of “detainees,” and we should not imagine that they were all invented in the last hundred years. Paul was used by now to bodily suffering, but in Ephesus he had experienced torture at a deeper level. His emotions, his imagination, his innermost heart had been unbearably crushed. The fact that someone comes along one day, flings open the prison door, and tells you to be on your way doesn’t mean you can take a deep breath, give yourself a shake, and emerge smiling into the sunlight. The memories are ever present; the voices, both outside and inside; the nightmares, ready to pounce the minute you close your eyes. The mental scars remain after the physical ones have healed.
He took those scars first, we can be sure, to Colossae. Philemon’s guest room was waiting for him. Perhaps he spent some weeks there, slowly allowing the nightmares to subside. But, to be sure, his main purpose was to head for Corinth, and he was not going to risk doing what he’d done before, taking a ship straight across the Aegean. He did not want to appear suddenly at Cenchreae, the eastern port, and have the church in Corinth startled at his unheralded approach. He wanted to know, well in advance, what sort of reception he might get. Would they, after all, be loyal to him?
This involved meeting up with Titus. After the debacle of the “sorrowful visit,” Paul had written the “painful letter,” no doubt rebuking the church members for the way they had treated him (Was it one or two people in particular? We don’t know.) and urging them toward reconciliation. Had they really suggested—he could hardly believe it, but it still rang in his ears—that if he wanted to come back, he’d better get some new references? Had they really told him that his personal presence and public speaking style were out of line with what they now wanted in a leader in an up-market city like Corinth? And had they really been so annoyed by his switching of his travel plans that they were now saying they couldn’t believe a word he said?
Yes, they had said all those things—or so we infer from the letter. But the letter we call 2 Corinthians seems itself to have been dragged out of Paul in bits and pieces. It stops and starts and changes gears abruptly, and it’s not hard to see why. It isn’t just that Paul is writing it in bits, on the move around northern Greece in late 56 or early 57. It isn’t just that any early exhilaration following his release from prison and his recovery of freedom has worn off or that the painful memories still haunt him every night. It is also that he is genuinely anxious; he still doesn’t know if the “painful letter” has simply caused more trouble, or if the Corinthians have abandoned their hostility toward him and now want to be reconciled. Titus had taken the letter, but where was he?
So Paul traveled north to Troas, nearly two hundred miles, hoping against hope that he would find Titus there. The little group of disciples in the city was eager for him to stay and preach the gospel; he calls it “an open door waiting for me in the Lord.”1 But he couldn’t rest. His spirit was troubled. If the nightmare from Ephesus was fading, the older one from Corinth was still there. He played it through in his head again and again, the scenes he never expected to see from the people to whom he had sent that wonderful poem about love: angry faces, raised voices, people he considered friends now looking the other way, people with whom he had once prayed and wept now either absenting themselves or telling him to his face that he was out of line, no longer required. He was desperate to know how things now stood. What would he find when he got there? And—even more troubling—what would now become of his great project, the collection for Jerusalem? The northern Greek cities would contribute, he was sure of that; but they were poor. Without a contribution from Corinth, it might look meager, a small gesture that would be scorned because of its size as well as suspect because of its source.
So he pressed on to Macedonia, to Philippi and Thessalonica. “Don’t worry about anything,” he had written to the Philippians not that long before.2 That, he knows, is easier said than done; it was always a goal to be striven for, not a permanent condition of smug spirituality. Now, arriving in Philippi, he was “troubled in every way,” with “battles outside and fears inside.”3
We have a sense in these clipped, tortured remarks that we are privy to a man’s inmost feelings in a way paralleled in few ancient texts. There are occasional flashes in the letters of Cicero or Seneca, perhaps, though they are written with a conscious polish and display. The urbane Marcus Aurelius projects his cool, studied Stoicism. The nearest we come might be Augustine, four hundred years later. The normal modern perception of Paul as a strident, overconfident moralist will not do. Not only is he physically and emotionally battered; he doesn’t mind if the Corinthians know it. That, in a world where leaders were supposed to be socially respectable, exemplary characters, is exactly the point.
So once more he goes around the tracks. Moving on from Troas to Macedonia, retracing the journey he had made with such excitement just a few years before, he still cannot relax or rest. And always the nagging question: Has it, after all, been all in vain?
Then, suddenly, the clouds roll away and the sun comes out again. His beloved churches in Philippi and Thessalonica hadn’t been able to comfort him. Only one thing would do that. At last, it happened:
The God who comforts the downcast comforted us by the arrival of Titus, and not only by his arrival but in the comfort he had received from you, as he told us about your longing for us, your lamenting, and your enthusiasm for me personally.4
The news was good. The Corinthians were appalled to think how badly they had treated him, and they were falling over themselves to apologize. They were doing everything they could to put things right. The underlying problem had involved some actual wrongdoing (what this was, as we saw, it’s impossible now to tell), and they were keen to sort it all out. Their loyalty has been contested, but it has held firm. So Paul, having been downcast beyond measure as he waited for news, is now over the top in his celebration:
As a result, I was more inclined to celebrate; because, if I did make you sad by my letter, I don’t regret it; and, if I did regret it, it was because I saw that I made you sad for a while by what I had written. Anyway, I’m celebrating now, not because you were saddened, but because your sadness brought you to repentance. It was a sadness from God, you see, and it did you no harm at all on our account. . . .
The real celebration, though, on top of all our comfort, came because Titus was so overjoyed. You really did cheer him up and set his mind at rest. . . . I am celebrating the fact that I have confidence in you in everything.5
With that, he can get down to business in a very different frame of mind. The next two chapters are about the Jerusalem collection. The Macedonian churches have already sorted out their contribution, and it is remarkably substantial, considering their own suffering and poverty. Now it is Corinth’s turn. Paul is sending Titus back again, with two other companions (tantalizingly for us, he doesn’t say who they are). They are to instruct the Corinthians to have their contributions ready, so that there will be no embarrassment when Paul arrives.
Having mentioned the varieties of writing style in 2 Corinthians, we should note—as a measure of something about Paul’s personality—that chapters 8 and 9, the fund-raising section so to speak, are written in very labored and tortured Greek. I have myself done a small amount of church fund-raising, and I find it comforting that the awkwardness I have always felt in asking people for money, even for causes in which I passionately believed, appears similar to what Paul obviously felt in writing these chapters. A measure of this awkwardness is that at no point in thirty-nine verses does he mention the word “money” or anything close to it. He talks of “the grace” and “the deed,” “the service,” “your service in this ministry,” and of course “partnership,” koinōnia.
All of this sets the scene for us to look at the letter as a whole. As we have noticed, it moves jerkily between one theme and another. But the underlying topic is Paul’s own apostolic ministry. Whatever specific problems there had been, they stemmed from the Corinthians’ failure to understand what apostolic ministry really ought to be like. That failure, in turn, grew out of a shallow or inadequate view of the gospel itself. Having had his own ministry challenged at the deepest level, he addresses head on the question of what an apostle is and does. His answer focuses on the strange way in which the death of Jesus plays out in the work of the apostle. That is how the “ministry of reconciliation” will go forward, with the apostle as it were embodying the divine faithfulness, thereby demonstrating once more the way in which Paul is modeled upon the “servant” of Isaiah 49.6
In particular, Paul challenges any suggestion that he might need “official references” if he wanted to return to Corinth. “Look in the mirror,” he says. “You are our official reference!” The Corinthian church, as it stands, indwelt by the spirit, is “a letter from the Messiah, with us as the messengers.”7 This shows that they are indeed people of the renewed covenant promised in scripture, and this in turn shows that Paul’s apostleship was and is the real thing. Paul argues this point in chapter 3 by means of an extended comparison between Moses’s hearers and Paul’s own. Moses couldn’t speak plainly because his hearers’ hearts were hard, but Paul can and does speak plainly and boldly (to the Corinthians’ obvious discomfort), because their hearts have been transformed by the spirit.
This itself is clear enough. But Paul goes on to insist that the ministry he exercises is simply the extended ministry of the crucified and exalted Lord himself:
The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they won’t see the light of the gospel of the glory of the Messiah, who is God’s image. We don’t proclaim ourselves, you see, but Jesus the Messiah as Lord, and ourselves as your servants because of Jesus; because the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts, to produce the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah.8
We are here very close to Paul’s words about Jesus in Colossians, and with the same effect: Jesus is the true Image of God, the genuine human who embodies in himself the loving purposes of God, purposes that involve the creator God himself launching his new creation, through the gospel of Jesus and the power of the spirit, in the hearts and lives of his people.
This brings Paul back to the truth that had been burned into him, painfully, over the previous months:
We have this treasure in earthenware pots, so that the extraordinary quality of the power may belong to God, not to us. We are under all kinds of pressure, but we are not crushed completely; we are at a loss, but not at our wits’ end; we are persecuted, but not abandoned; we are cast down, but not destroyed. We always carry the deadness of Jesus about in the body, so that the life of Jesus may be revealed in our body.9
This leads in turn to further reflections on death and life, developing things Paul had said about the resurrection in the previous letter.
One point stands out of particular interest as we continue our quest to find out what drove him on. He still expects the return of Jesus, and with it the resurrection of the dead. But whereas in 1 Corinthians he had assumed he would be among those still alive at the time,10 he is now facing the prospect that he may well die before it all happens. This has been anticipated in Philippians11 and is now built into his thinking, no doubt as part of his having “received the death sentence” in Ephesus.12 His view of God’s future has not changed. What has shifted is his view of where he might fit into that future. But, however all that will work out, the coming resurrection with all that it entails is the platform on which Paul places one of his most characteristic and central statements of what his lifelong vocation really meant. This, in his own words, is what made him the person he was:
We must all appear before the judgment seat of the Messiah, so that each may receive what has been done through the body, whether good or bad.
So we know the fear of the Lord; and that’s why we are persuading people—but we are open to God, and open as well, I hope, to your consciences. We aren’t trying to recommend ourselves again! We are giving you a chance to be proud of us, to have something to say to those who take pride in appearances rather than in people’s hearts.
If we are beside ourselves, you see, it’s for God; and if we are in our right mind, it’s for you. For the Messiah’s love makes us press on. We have come to the conviction that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all in order that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised on their behalf.13
“The fear of the Lord” is a reverent fear; but there is also, and above all, love. A day of judgment is coming when all work will be assessed, but behind that, and motivating Paul far more deeply than anything else, was that sense of a personal love, love for him, love through him. The love of which he spoke in his first letter (“the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me”). The love that he saw at work now in Corinth and Ephesus, in Philippi and Thessalonica; the love that then became a rich bond with friends and fellow workers despite all disagreements and disappointments. The love that would, after all, hold strong despite everything. In and through it all, the new covenant in Messiah and spirit means new creation:
Thus, if anyone is in the Messiah, there is a new creation! Old things have gone, and look—everything has become new! It all comes from God. He reconciled us to himself through the Messiah, and he gave us the ministry of reconciliation.14
If the Corinthians had never understood what Paul was about before, they surely do now. He is not playing at being an apostle. He is not conforming his message or his methods to the social and cultural standards of any city or civilization. If people don’t like what they see, that is their problem; Jews demand signs, Greeks seek wisdom, and all they get is a crucified Messiah.
Yes, and a suffering apostle. This is the whole point, the theme that ties together everything else in 2 Corinthians, the theme that had been etched into Paul’s heart as well as his body by the last year or two even more than it had been already. Having stressed to the Corinthians that he doesn’t use rhetoric and simply tells it like it is, as he was warming to his theme he must have smiled darkly at the prospect of giving them a couple of volleys of verbal pyrotechnics. Here is the first:
We recommend ourselves as God’s servants: with much patience, with sufferings, difficulties, hardships, beatings, imprisonments, riots, hard work, sleepless nights, going without food, with purity, knowledge, great-heartedness, kindness, the holy spirit, genuine love, by speaking the truth, by God’s power, with weapons for God’s faithful work in left and right hand alike, through glory and shame, through slander and praise; as deceivers, and yet true; as unknown, yet very well known; as dying, and look—we are alive; as punished, yet not killed; as sad, yet always celebrating; as poor, yet bringing riches to many; as having nothing, yet possessing everything.15
And yet there is more. Now that Titus has met him and has assured him that the Corinthians are in a penitent and eager frame of mind, he relaxes. And this enables him, in the last chapters of the letter, to address a deeper problem that seems to have lain under some of the surface noise. There are some people, whether still in Corinth or still having an influence over the Corinthians, who have been lauding themselves, claiming some kind of superiority over Paul himself. They are Jews, that much is clear. But whether they are the kind of Jews who would insist on circumcision for Gentile converts we may doubt, since Paul nowhere here deploys any of the arguments he uses in Galatians and elsewhere against that position.
From what he says it appears that they have been “boasting” of their status, their achievements, their methods, and maybe other things as well. And they are angry because Paul refuses to dance to their tunes. He will not play their games. He had seen that problem coming a long time before, which is why, though he has accepted financial support from the churches of Macedonia in northern Greece, he has always refused such help from Corinth itself. He said this already in 1 Corinthians 9, and now he reemphasizes it in 2 Corinthians 11.16 This was, and is, his “boast”: that he has made the gospel what it really is, “free of charge.”17 And now he is himself accused of being standoffish, of not really loving them.18 Nobody will be able to “buy” him, to pay the piper and then call the tunes. Anyone who has had to deal with the complexities of church finances, especially in a community with wide differences of wealth, knows that the mixture of money and ministry can easily cause tension, especially where, underneath it all, there is a question of social status.
All this precipitates one of the finest and indeed funniest flights of rhetoric anywhere in the New Testament. After all the heartache earlier in the letter, in 2 Corinthians 11:16–12:10 Paul finally draws himself up to his full height.
To understand how this passage works and to get a new and sharp insight into how Paul’s mind and imagination themselves seem to have worked, we have to put ourselves into the world of a Roman colony like Corinth. Roman officials, in both Rome itself and the provinces, were expected to celebrate their achievements. As they looked forward to the end of their time in office, they would hope to carve, in stone or even marble, their list of achievements, their public works projects. That is what Augustus had done, spectacularly carving his list of achievements in huge letters on monuments all around the empire. The Roman equivalent of a curriculum vitae (remember that the Corinthians wanted fresh letters of recommendation for Paul) was called the cursus honorum, the “course of honors.” You would list your time as quaestor, your elevation to praetor. You would note the time when you had been in charge of the city waterworks or other important civic roles. Then, if you were fortunate, you would note the year when you served as consul. That remained, for most, the pinnacle of a political career, even under the empire, when everyone knew the consuls took second place to the emperor himself. Then you would note your service as proconsul, running a province. In addition, there was your army career: a list of campaigns fought, wounds, decorations received.
For a soldier there was a special honor. In the siege of a city, ladders were put up to get over the city wall. Since that was one of the most dangerous, indeed crazy, things to attempt, the first person over the wall in an attack (always supposing he survived) could claim as his prize the coveted Corona Muralis, the “Wall Crown.” But with several ladders going up simultaneously, it was hard to be sure who made it first. You might therefore have to claim this award on oath. It was the equivalent of the British Victoria Cross, the highest honor a soldier could achieve.
That is the kind of person the Corinthians were prepared to look up to. They would have been delighted with the “celebrity culture” in some parts of today’s Western church. That is what they were hoping Paul would be like, which is why they were so ashamed of his shabby presence, his awkward speaking manner, his blunt and direct teaching style. It speaks volumes for Paul as a person, for what 2 Corinthians is all about, and for what (he would have said) the gospel is all about, that the climax of the letter is a glorious parody of this whole world of imperial boasting, achievements, going over the wall, and everything else. He boasts of all the wrong things. Having warned them that he is going to be speaking like a complete fool, he launches in:
Are they servants of the Messiah?—I’m talking like a raving madman—I’m a better one. I’ve worked harder, been in prison more often, been beaten more times than I can count, and I’ve often been close to death. Five times I’ve had the Jewish beating, forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods; once I was stoned; three times I was shipwrecked; I was adrift in the sea for a night and a day. I’ve been constantly traveling, facing dangers from rivers, dangers from brigands, dangers from my own people, dangers from foreigners, dangers in the town, dangers in the countryside, dangers at sea, dangers from false believers. I’ve toiled and labored, I’ve burned the candle at both ends, I’ve been hungry and thirsty, I’ve often gone without food altogether, I’ve been cold and naked.
Quite apart from all that, I have this daily pressure on me, my care for all the churches. Who is weak and I’m not weak? Who is offended without me burning with shame?
If I must boast, I will boast of my weaknesses. The God and father of the Lord Jesus, who is blessed forever, knows that I’m not lying: in Damascus, King Aretas, the local ruler, was guarding the city of Damascus so that he could capture me, but I was let down in a basket through a window and over the wall, and I escaped his clutches.19
“So there you have it. Here is my list of achievements,” he says. “Here is my curriculum vitae, my job application as an apostle! And, as the climax of it all, I declare on oath that when the going got tough, I was the first one over the wall running away.” We have to hope that by this point the great majority of those listening to the letter in Corinth were at least smiling broadly. Here is a majestic piece of rhetoric in order to explain that rhetoric doesn’t matter (“I am no orator as Brutus is”). Here is an upside-down boasting list, a cursus pudorum, if you like, a “course of shame.”
Paul then continues in chapter 12 with his spiritual experiences, but he seems strangely reticent: “Someone . . . fourteen years ago . . . was snatched up to the third heaven . . . and heard . . . words . . . humans are not allowed to repeat.”20 It’s the same point. Yes, obviously Paul has had extraordinary experiences, but that isn’t the basis on which he stands before them as an apostle of the crucified Messiah. The main thing is that Paul, at the end of it all, received “a thorn in the flesh.” Speculation has been rife. Was it an illness? A particular physical weakness? A special nagging temptation that kept coming back to bite him? A sorrowful conscience about his former violent life or his bitter public row with Barnabas? He doesn’t say.
What he does say, and it’s worth more than all the actual information we could have, is what he had learned through that experience and particularly, we may suppose, through the entire horrible process of the confrontation in Corinth and the breakdown in Ephesus. “My grace is enough for you,” said the Lord. “My power comes to perfection in weakness.”21 Exactly what Paul needed to hear; exactly what the Corinthians did not want to hear. But hear it they must, because it comes at the end of the most powerful and personal letter Paul has written to date:
So I will be all the more pleased to boast of my weaknesses, so that the Messiah’s power may rest upon me. So I’m delighted when I’m weak, insulted, in difficulties, persecuted. and facing disasters, for the Messiah’s sake. When I’m weak, you see, then I am strong.22
So Paul returns to Corinth at last. The Lord has given him authority, he says, not to pull down, but to build up.23 If there is still pulling down to do, he will do it; but he has learned, as he had said to the Philippians, to be content with whatever comes. The final resolution of Paul’s long and complex relationship with Corinth reveals him as a man into whom the gospel of the crucified and risen Lord has burned like a brand. He is recognizable. Corinth and Ephesus themselves have done it to him. He is marked out, beyond any question, as the representative of the crucified Messiah.
* * *
Throughout these turbulent years, something had been stirring in Paul’s mind and heart. He knew his vocation, the thing for which Jesus had called him on the Damascus Road. He had sometimes been tempted to wonder whether he had been wasting his time, but each time that thought returned, he played it through the mental loop of Isaiah 49 (the servant’s question whether it was all in vain and the divine vocation that always answered that question). He carried on through heartache and collapse, but also through moments of great encouragement and celebration. He had taught, and argued, and preached, and discussed, in brief conversations and lengthy dialogues, with strangers and friends, with eager colleagues and suspicious onlookers. He had been around the tracks. He knew what he believed, how the great scriptural narratives of Abraham, Exodus, David, exile, and Messiah worked. He had expounded it a thousand times and discussed its implications and outworkings in every conceivable variation and against every possible objection. So now, as he settled down to plan and then to dictate his great letter to Rome, he was not, to put it mildly, thinking things through for the first time. Romans itself was new, but every idea it expounded had been tried, tested, and worked out in detail.
There were specific reasons for writing Romans at that moment (probably in the spring or summer of 57). We will come to those presently. But why write it like this? Romans is in a different category from Paul’s other letters for many reasons, but particularly because of its careful and powerful structure. It comes in four sections, each of which has its own integrity, underlying argument, and inner movement. Together these four sections form a single line of thought, rising and falling but always on the way to the particular points that he wants to make. It remains an open question (at least for me) whether Paul was aware of literary models or precedents for this kind of thing. What cannot be doubted is that he had thought it through very carefully and knew exactly what he was doing. Scholars and preachers sometimes speak and write as though Paul just made things up on the fly. There may be passages like that—one thinks of some of the sharp phrases in Galatians, for instance, which a cooler editorial eye might have struck out—but not in Romans. He has thought, prayed, and taught this material again and again. He has now decided to pour this distilled essence of his biblical and Jesus-focused teaching into these four jars and place them in a row where together they will say more than the sum of their parts.
This does not happen by accident. Romans is not like, say, 1 Corinthians (the next longest letter), where, though there is a flow of thought, one thing follows another in something more like a list. Romans has a quality of literary artistry attempted nowhere else by Paul, or, one might add, by any of his contemporaries. It should be listened to in the way one might listen to a symphony—not simply for the next big tune, but for the larger whole to which all the tunes contribute.
Some have suggested, naturally enough, that Romans was a deliberate “systematic theology,” summing up the beliefs that Paul had hammered out over the previous decade of work. There is more than a grain of truth in that. But not only are there significant omissions (no mention, for instance, of the Eucharist, which we know from 1 Corinthians was a vital focus of early Christian worship), but, despite the “divisions” and “headings” in some translations, the flow of thought in the letter is not a matter of moving from one “topic” to another. It is, to say it again, a sustained and integrated argument, in which Paul comes back again and again to similar topics, but each time (to continue the musical analogy) in a different key or with different orchestration.
The letter is not simply a summary of everything Paul had been teaching. It is designed to make vital points to the church in Rome. Paul had not visited Rome, but from the greetings at the end of the letter he obviously had several friends there, and he knew quite a bit about what was going on in both the church and the wider society. All this is relevant to what he says and why.
The most obvious reason is that he now intended to round off his work in the eastern end of the Mediterranean world and to move on to the West. As I suggested earlier, I think this is a more focused ambition than simply finding more people to preach to, more “souls” to “save” (not that Paul would have put it like that). He wanted to plant the flag of the messianic gospel in key points where another “gospel” was being flaunted, namely, the “gospel” of the Roman Empire, of Caesar and all his works. Rome itself was therefore the obvious target; but out beyond that, Spain, the western edge of the world so far as Paul’s contemporaries were aware, was a major center of Roman culture and influence. Paul’s great contemporary Seneca had come from there. Galba, soon to enjoy a few months as emperor, had been governor there, based in the port of Tarragona, which would presumably be Paul’s initial target. Tarragona boasted a large temple to Caesar. As in Ephesus or Corinth, Paul would have longed to announce that Jesus was the true Kyrios right under Caesar’s nose. No matter what it cost.
But for this he needed a base, both, we may assume, as a source of financial and practical support and also as a community that would enter into koinōnia with him in prayer. And for that there had to be deep mutual understanding. They had to know who he was and what his work was all about. They might have heard all sorts of rumors about him. Some might distrust him, either because he was too Jewish or because he treated elements of Jewish practice too loosely (both accusations had been made, after all). Some kind of outline of his teaching was a basic necessity.
But that is only a start. There was a more pressing need. Something had happened in the recent past that had put the Roman Jesus-followers in a new and complex position. We recall that Claudius, who became emperor in AD 41, had banished the Jews from Rome after riots in their community. We have less information about this than we would like, but such evidence as we have suggests the late 40s as the probable time. (We should also assume that not all Jews would actually have left, only that the community would have been decimated and that any remaining Jews might have had to go to ground to hide their identity.) Paul’s friends Priscilla and Aquila were among those who had left, which was why they were there in Corinth when Paul first arrived, probably in 49. But with Claudius’s death in 54 and Nero’s accession to the throne, Claudius’s edict was revoked. Jews could once again be, if not exactly welcome, at least permitted back in town.
I say “if not exactly welcome” because in this period, as in many other times and cultures, there was a streak, and sometimes more than a streak, of anti-Jewish sentiment in Rome. (We use the term “anti-Jewish” not “anti-Semitic,” because the latter implies some kind of racial theory unknown until the nineteenth century.) Think of the charge in Philippi that Paul and Silas were Jews, teaching things it would be illegal for Romans to practice. Think of the angry whispers when Alexander, a Jew, stood up to speak in the amphitheater at Ephesus. The same thing can be sensed on the edge of remarks in poets like Juvenal or sneering historians like Tacitus.
Underneath the ethnic prejudice there was always the theological suspicion, which would then be transferred in subsequent centuries to the Christians, that Jews didn’t worship the gods, so if bad things happened, people knew who to blame. Even in Corinth, Gallio’s refusal to make a judgment about Paul causes the mob to beat up the synagogue president, and they get away with it. Going after the Jews was a default mode for many, right across the Roman Empire. The Romans had allowed the Jewish people to worship their own God, to raise taxes for the Temple in Jerusalem, and to be exempt from religious observances that would compromise their beliefs, including the worship of Rome and the emperor. But that didn’t mean that the Romans liked them. And Paul could see, only too clearly, what that might lead to.
A century later, he was proved dramatically right. A leader called Marcion, originally from Sinope on the Black Sea shore of Asia Minor, arrived in Rome teaching a version of Christianity in which the God of Jesus was sharply distinguished from the God of the Jews. He produced a heavily truncated edition of the New Testament, with the Jewish and scriptural bits omitted or amended. The Christian faith as he taught it—and he became very popular—left no room for Jews and their traditions. It had become a completely Gentile phenomenon.
It didn’t take much imagination to see this danger coming. It had been less likely in the churches Paul had founded in Asia Minor and Greece, since he always started in the synagogue and made it clear that the message was “to the Jew first, and also, equally, to the Greek.”24 Paul had given no opportunity for any idea of a Gentile-only Jesus community. In most of the cities where he had preached, with the possible exception of a large metropolis like Ephesus, the probability is that the community of Jesus-followers was never very large, perhaps only ever a few dozen, or in Corinth conceivably a hundred or two. It would have been harder, though still not impossible, for significantly different theological positions to develop in such communities, at least to begin with. But in Rome things were different. The message of Jesus had evidently arrived there sometime in the 40s (tradition says that Peter brought it, but there is no first-century evidence for that), and Rome was in any case a city where, as in some large cities today, different cultural and ethnic groups from all over the empire would cluster in their own parts of town. It is highly likely, and this is borne out by the greetings to the different house-churches in Romans 16, that there were many different groups in Rome all worshipping Jesus but not really in contact with one another and almost certainly with different local customs that would owe more than a little to the culture from which they had come.
This was a new situation, and it called for a new kind of exposition. That is why, by the way, it makes no sense to see Paul’s letters as successive drafts of a “systematic theology,” so that, for instance, Galatians might be a first draft and Romans a final draft of essentially the same script. Galatians and Romans of course cover similar topics up to a point. But whereas Galatians is written in haste and heat to say, Under no circumstances must you get circumcised and take on the Torah, Romans is written at more leisure and with more compositional care to say, You must work out the gospel-shaped balance of Jew and Greek.
It isn’t that he is “anti-law” in Galatians and “pro-law” in Romans. That kind of shallow analysis has long had its day. It is, rather, that he can see one kind of danger in Galatia and realizes that it must be headed off immediately. He can see another, more long-term danger in Rome, and he decides to draw on his entire lifetime of biblical and pastoral reflection to construct a work that ought to ward off what to him would be the utter nonsense of a Jesus movement that was now eager to leave its Jewish and scriptural roots behind. He knew only too well from personal experience that Jews would regard him as a traitor, no better than a pagan, and that pagans might regard him as one of those annoying Jews, with some extra irritating bits of his own. The new wine of the gospel would be too sweet for some and too dry for others. But he had no choice. “The Messiah’s love,” he had written to Corinth, “makes us press on.25
Paul saw, then, the danger that a new generation of Roman Jesus-followers would have grown up, in the absence of Jews between 49 and 54, to be proud of the fact that this new cult, though “accidentally” having begun in the Jewish world, had now become a completely Gentile phenomenon. The temptation would then be for such a new generation to look at the powerful synagogue communities in Rome, up and running again after five years in abeyance, and to assume that the God of Jesus had finished with the Jews once and for all. The proud and vital word “Messiah” would just become a proper name. Worshipping Jesus would no longer be invested with the echoes of the Psalms and prophets, according to whom Israel’s Messiah would be the Lord of the whole world. The Jesus movement would turn itself into a kind of private spirituality, less concerned with the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven and more concerned with cultivating one’s own spiritual interiority. It would no longer be a movement based on messianic eschatology. It would become a “religion” that saw itself as different from “the Jewish religion,” a private religion that would no longer pose much of a threat to the principalities and powers, the rulers and authorities.
This is exactly what happened in the second half of the second century with the rise of so-called Gnosticism, a religion of inner self-discovery rather than of rescue, of private devotion rather than public witness. Though Marcion regarded Paul as a hero (because he misunderstood him to be saying that God had finished with the Jews and their law), Paul himself, and especially Romans, stands firmly in the way of his entire scheme.
If the Roman church was going to be tempted to think that God had now cut off the Jewish people for good—and it might not only be Gentile Christians who thought that; perhaps some Jewish Christians, fed up with their recalcitrant unbelieving fellow Jews, might go that route as well—then there would be an equal problem among the different house-churches in Rome itself. The high probability is that Romans 14 and 15, where Paul addresses the question of different practices within different Christian circles, was addressed specifically to small groups that had become settled in their ways, whether it had to do with dietary laws (or the decision not to observe them) or Sabbaths and other holy days (and the question of whether they mattered anymore).
This question is obviously cognate with the question Paul faced in 1 Corinthians 8–10, but it is not exactly the same. There is no suggestion in 1 Corinthians that Paul was there dealing with separate groups worshipping in different locations, in different house-churches. He was addressing Jesus-followers holding different opinions, but all belonging to the one church in Corinth; in this situation differences of practice might have an immediate impact on the unity and fellowship of that church. In Rome it was different. The groups were already separate. They had already developed different codes of practice. They would now regard one another with suspicion. They would not be able to worship together. They probably used different songs; they might well speak Greek with very different accents, reflecting their countries of origin. (Latin was the elite language; a good many inhabitants of Rome at this time were basically Greek-speaking.)
Paul, coming to Rome for the first time but hoping to use it as a base for mission farther west, could not build on a foundation like that. He could not simply align himself with one or two of the Roman house-churches and ignore the rest. The unity he so passionately advocated was not just a pleasant ideal. It was vital for the coherence of his own mission. It was also, as he had said in Ephesians, the way in which God’s wisdom in all its rich variety would be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. If Caesar and the dark powers that stood behind him were to be confronted with the “good news” that there was “another king, Jesus,” the community that was living by that message had to be united. This would of course be a differentiated unity (“God’s wisdom in all its rich variety”; and we may compare the vivid lists of ministries in 1 Cor. 12 and Eph. 4). But if it was all differentiation and no unity, Caesar need take no notice; they were just a few more peculiar eastern cults come to town.
The underlying message of Romans, with these sharp-edged issues as key notes to be struck at some of the letter’s climactic points, is of course the lordship of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and hence the world’s rightful sovereign. The grand formal introduction to the letter makes it clear: the resurrection of the crucified Jesus had demonstrated him to be Messiah, “son of God,” and the messianic psalms, particularly Psalm 2, challenged the kings of the world to come humbly before him and learn wisdom. From the time of Augustus onward, the Caesars had let it be known that events of their rule, including their accession, their birthday, and so on, were matters of “good news,” euangelia in Greek, since with Caesar as Kyrios (“Lord”) and Sōtēr (“Savior”) a new golden age had arrived in the world, an age particularly characterized by dikaiosynē (“justice”), sōtēria (“salvation”), and eirēnē (“peace”). Caesar’s all-conquering power (dynamis) had achieved these and would maintain them. The appropriate response from his subjects was “loyalty” or “faithfulness” (pistis), “believing obedience,” you might say.
Paul’s euangelion used the same terms, but meant something quite different. The differences were marked not least in poems like Philippians 2:6–11 and in Paul’s own embracing of the cursus pudorum, the “course of shame,” over against the Roman cursus honorum, “course of honor.” It was never a simple matter of a single scale with Caesar at the wrong end and Jesus at the right end. That would pull Jesus down to Caesar’s level, which could itself be a disastrous mistake if the church, in Rome or elsewhere, thought that allegiance to Jesus meant disobeying, on principle, the divinely appointed civil ruler. That would itself be a paganization of the essentially Jewish monotheistic vision of earthly rulers articulated by Jesus, Paul, and Peter.26 This didn’t mean, of course, that earthly rulers could do no wrong. Far from it. Paul, as usual, is resisting shallow and simplistic reductions. Instead, the main theological argument of the letter is framed by an introduction and conclusion that look Caesar in the face and declare that Jesus is not only the true Lord, but also a different kind of Lord:
Paul, a slave of King Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for God’s good news, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the sacred writings—the good news about his son, who was descended from David’s seed in terms of flesh, and who was marked out powerfully as God’s son in terms of the spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead: Jesus, the king, our Lord!
Through him we have received grace and apostleship to bring about believing obedience among all the nations for the sake of his name. That includes you too who are called by Jesus the king. . . .
I’m not ashamed of the good news; it’s God’s power, bringing salvation to everyone who believes—to the Jew first, and also, equally, to the Greek. This is because God’s covenant justice is unveiled in it, from faithfulness to faithfulness.27
Here we have it all—David’s true son, marked out as such by the resurrection and hence exalted as Lord over all human authorities, inaugurating a reign of true justice and salvation for all who would be loyal.
So too at the close of the great argument:
The Messiah became a servant of the circumcised people in order to demonstrate the truthfulness of God—that is, to confirm the promises to the patriarchs, and to bring the nations to praise God for his mercy. As the Bible says:
That is why I will praise you among the nations,
and will sing to your name.
And again it says,
Rejoice, you nations, with his people.
And again,
Praise the Lord, all nations,
And let all the peoples sing his praise.
And Isaiah says once more:
There shall be the root of Jesse,
The one who rises up to rule the nations;
The nations shall hope in him.28
It is noticeable that this final peroration is introduced with the clear imperative to the Roman house-churches: “Welcome one another, therefore, as the Messiah has welcomed you, to God’s glory.”29 The unity of the Messiah’s people across traditional divisions is part of the vital way in which the followers of Jesus will be a sign of his worldwide rule, already inaugurated. The “root of Jesse” (David’s true heir, in other words) is the one who rises to rule the nations. The resurrection of Jesus is the foundation of a genuinely Pauline political and social theology—as well as of everything else that Paul believed about him.
Romans, then, is a many-sided letter, but with a single line of thought. It would be silly to try to give an adequate summary of it in a book like the present one. Those who want to do business with Paul the man, Paul the thinker, Paul the pastor and preacher will sooner or later want to sit down and try to figure it all out for themselves. Reading it straight through at a sitting, perhaps often, is something few modern readers attempt, though it is of course how it would first have been heard, when Phoebe from Cenchreae, having been entrusted with it by Paul, read it out loud in the congregations in Rome. She probably expounded it too, answering the questions that would naturally arise. It would then have been copied and read again and again, normally straight through. We may then assume that it was studied in shorter sections by some at least, particularly the teachers, in the Roman congregations, and indeed in the other churches to which copies would have been sent (we have early evidence of a copy in Ephesus from which the long list of greetings to Rome was omitted). That discipline, of reading straight through and then studying section by section, all bathed in the praying and worshipping life of the community, remains essential to this day.
But something at least must be said as a start. God has done what he always said he would, Paul is saying, and this is what that means today. The gospel events—the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the spirit—have burst upon an unready world, and also upon a Jewish world that was looking the other way. But God has thereby unveiled his faithfulness to the covenant, the covenant with Abraham and Israel through which he always purposed to put the whole creation right at last. God’s creation has been spoiled by human idolatry and sin, and even his chosen people have appeared unable to do anything about it. But now (that’s one of Paul’s favorite phrases, for example, in Romans 3:21) God has revealed that what his covenant purposes had always involved was the “putting forth” of Jesus the Messiah as the means of establishing a new reality, a single family whose sins are forgiven, a Jew-plus-Gentile covenant family, as he always promised to Abraham. That is the thrust of the first part, chapters 1–4.
Here at last Paul pulls out that saying that he knew from the traditions of “zeal” studied in his boyhood. Phinehas killed the idolatrous man, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness; in other words, God established a covenant with him. Maybe so, Paul now thinks, but according to Genesis 15:6 Abraham believed God—believed, that is, the promise that he would be the father of an uncountable family that would inherit the whole world—and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. This faith, this trust, this loyalty was Abraham’s covenant badge. A covenant, Paul saw, to which the One God had been faithful in the events of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. A covenant in which all who believed in “the one who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord” were now full members.
Now, therefore, the loyal faith by which a Jew or Gentile reaches out to grasp the promise, believing “in the God who raises the dead,” would be the one and only badge of membership in Abraham’s family. The family could not be created either by circumcision (which was added later than Gen. 15) or by following the law (which was added hundreds of years afterward). It could only be by a fresh act of God’s grace, received by faith. The use of Romans 1–4 in popular teaching today to declare universal human sinfulness and “justification” by grace alone and through faith alone is fine as far as it goes. Sadly, it routinely shrinks what Paul is actually saying in these chapters and fails to see that they are only one part of a larger argument and do not make full sense without the material that then follows. Romans is not written to explain how people may be saved. It describes that, to be sure, vividly and compellingly, but it does so in order to highlight the faithfulness of God and, with that, the challenges facing the covenant people. Those were the themes the Roman church urgently needed to understand.
What was the point, after all, of being part of Abraham’s family? Simply this (as Paul had expounded it in one synagogue after another across Turkey and Greece): according to Genesis itself and to many subsequent Jewish traditions, the call of Abraham was the divine answer to the sin of Adam. What we have in Abraham is therefore the promise that God will deal once and for all with sin and with the death that it brings in its wake. That is how the first four chapters of Romans work. And with that Paul has a natural transition to the second main section of the letter, chapters 5–8.
This time he tells more explicitly the story of the human race from Adam to the Messiah and on to the final promise of renewed creation. These chapters offer an astonishingly rich and multilayered account of the new Exodus, which was such a strong theme in early Christianity. The whole section is carefully structured in paragraphs almost all of which lead back to Jesus the Messiah. After the basic statement of “from Adam to the Messiah” in 5:12–21, Paul retells the Exodus narrative. Coming through the waters of baptism (chapter 6) is like going through the Red Sea, leaving behind slavery and discovering freedom. But then Israel arrives at Mt. Sinai and is given the Torah—which promptly declares that Israel has already transgressed. Indeed, as Deuteronomy made clear, the Torah simply brought Israel to the place of exile, of a new kind of slavery. The lament at the close of chapter 7 is the lament, seen with gospel hindsight, of “the Jew” who rightly celebrates the Torah and longs to be loyal to it, but finds that loyalty thwarted by the dark Adamic strain that runs through all humans, Jews included.
This is the complex problem—Adam’s problem, if you like, magnified enormously in the rebellion of God’s own people—to which Romans 8 is the matchless answer. The death of the Messiah and the gift of the spirit together do “what the law was incapable of doing,”30 that is, giving the life the law promised but could not bring about because of human (and Israelite) sin. Throughout chapter 8, Paul hints at a key theme from Exodus and from early Christianity as a whole: as the glorious divine presence guided the children of Israel through the wilderness, coming to dwell in the Tabernacle,31 so the spirit leads the Messiah’s people to their inheritance, which turns out to be not a single “promised land,” but the entire renewed creation.32
Because the whole renewed creation is the “inheritance” of the Messiah and his people, as in Psalm 2, this means that human beings are at last, as in Psalm 8, “crowned with glory and honor” and given the authority over creation that had been promised originally. As throughout Paul’s thought, and especially in 2 Corinthians, written so recently before Romans, the highly paradoxical mode of this “glory” is in fact suffering and the prayer that is wrenched from that suffering in “groanings too deep for words.”33 But in all these things, he concludes triumphantly, “we are completely victorious through the one who loved us.”34 That is the point to which he always returns when speaking from his deepest heart and mind: “the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me”; “the Messiah’s love makes us press on.” Now nothing in all creation “will be able to separate us from the love of God in King Jesus our Lord.”35 God’s covenant was always the bond of love and the promise of that love having its full effect. Now, in the Messiah and by the spirit, that covenant love is seen to be victorious. Romans 8 is the richest, deepest, and most powerfully sustained climax anywhere in the literature of the early Christian movement, and perhaps anywhere else as well.
Romans 5–8 (and indeed Romans 1–8) have often been allowed to stand by themselves as though they constituted “the gospel” and the rest of the letter was a mere succession of appendixes or “practical applications.” It is true that one can take these first two sections, perhaps especially 5–8, and let them have their own impact. Perhaps it is even good to do that from time to time to be sure that their full flavor has been realized. But if we are to understand Paul at this moment in his career, at an exciting but fateful transition, we are bound to conclude that, though these two opening sections have their own integrity, they are in fact designed as the foundations for a building of a very different sort. Romans 9–11 and 12–16 are part of Paul’s direct appeal to his Roman audience, or, as we should presumably say, audiences. Knowing that this was where he was going has colored and shaped chapters 1–4 and 5–8 as well. Unless we see the ultimate goal, we will not fully appreciate those sections for what they truly are.
Romans 9–11, the third and in many ways decisive section of the letter, is one of the most careful and sustained arguments anywhere in Paul’s letters. People sometimes talk as if, in this passage, Paul is just winging it, blundering ahead in the dark and trying out ideas, only then to modify or reject them and propose something else instead. Nothing could be farther from the truth. For a start, the section is carefully framed, in classic Jewish fashion, in prayer. Like many psalms, it opens with lament and closes with ringing praise. The long opening section (9:6–29) is matched by the long closing section (11:1–32); in between, the heart of the argument is found in 9:30–10:21, which itself focuses on a text that was vital throughout the Second Temple period, namely, the closing chapters of Deuteronomy, coming at the point where Paul has just finished the story of Israel as set out in the Torah. The Five Books of Moses, in fact, telling Israel’s story from Abraham to the warning of exile and the promise of restoration, remain the gold standard. Paul retells that story, just as many Jewish writers of his time had done and were to do again. At the vital point he insists, as he had done in synagogues from Antioch to Corinth, that the goal of the Torah, the aim and ultimate purpose of the whole great narrative, was the Messiah. Telos gar nomou Christos, “The Messiah is the goal of the law,”36 so that covenant membership may be available for all who believe.
This, then, is Israel’s story, the story of God’s covenant faithfulness to Israel, with Israel’s Messiah as its climax. It is not, and never can be, a story cut loose from the story of Israel, as Marcion would argue later on and as perhaps some in Rome were already supposing. Paul wants them to know of his “great sorrow and endless pain,”37 not now the anguish he suffered in Ephesus, but a more long-lasting torture of the heart, which started with the looks of rejection when he returned home to Tarsus for those ten silent years, continued as interest turned to anger in one synagogue after another, and climaxed in plots and violence from the very people who, he might have thought, ought to welcome their Messiah now that Paul had explained so clearly the scriptural basis for understanding the events concerning Jesus. (Paul was not alone in this sad reflection: “He came to what was his own,” John wrote of Jesus, “and his own people did not accept him.”)38 That is the substance of Paul’s lament, as also of the prayer “for their salvation.”39 And the way to that is stated in the clearest terms at the very center of this section: “If you profess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”40
Jesus, then, had not started a “new religion,” and Paul was not offering one. Either Jesus was Israel’s Messiah—which means, as any first-century Jew would know, that God was reconstituting “Israel” around him—or he was an imposter and his followers were blaspheming. There was no middle ground. And it was because of this Jewish, scripturally based vision of covenant fulfilled, of messianic reality come to birth, that there was such a thing as apostleship; in other words, Paul is saying to the church in Rome, “This is why I do what I do, and why I want you to back me as I do it all the way to Spain.” How are the nations to call on the Messiah without believing in him? How are they to believe if they don’t hear? “And how will they hear without someone announcing it to them? And how will people make that announcement unless they are sent?”41 Paul once again links his vocation to the “servant” passages in Isaiah and then pans back to show from the Psalms, Isaiah, and Deuteronomy (Writings, Prophets, and Torah) that God has done what he always said he would, however shocking and unexpected it now appears. And this brings us, he implies, to where we are today.
Romans 11 then forms a sustained argument of its own, thinking forward into this new and unprecedented moment in the story of God and Israel. Paul here, we remember, is writing to head off any suggestion in the Roman church that it’s now time for the followers of Jesus to cut loose from their Jewish context and see themselves as simply a Gentile community. We who know the equivalent diabolical forces in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can readily imagine how easily this might fit in with the social and cultural pressures in Rome. Paul will have none of it. He himself is a Jew; there is a remnant, marked out by grace and faith, and he is a representative of this group. But if that remnant is what it is by grace and faith rather than national privilege then, instead of shrinking to nothing, such a remnant can and will grow. “If they do not remain in unbelief, they will be grafted back in.”42 (We should note that “unbelief” here is more or less a technical term for “not recognizing Jesus as Israel’s Messiah”; Paul is well aware that the Jews of whom he speaks have a strong faith in and zeal for the One God, as he himself had had.)43
People have probed Romans 11 for specific promises about what it would mean for Jews to abandon this “unbelief,” in other words, when and how they might come to see Jesus as Messiah. Popular myths abound, some even suggesting that Romans 11 predicts the return of Jewish people to their ancestral homeland (which at the time of his writing they had not left). That is not the point. Paul is not trying to second-guess what God has in mind. He is saying, as strongly as he can, to a church in danger of Marcionism, of rejecting its Jewish heritage: “Don’t boast over the branches,”44 the branches that have been broken off from the original olive tree because of unbelief. God can graft them back again. What is more, the present fate of unbelieving Israel is itself the long outworking, as though in a shadow, of the messianic vocation itself:
By their trespass, salvation has come to the nations, in order to make them jealous. If their trespass means riches for the world, and their impoverishment means riches for the nations, how much more will their fullness mean?
Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Insofar as I am the apostle of the Gentiles, I celebrate my particular ministry, so that, if possible, I can make my “flesh” jealous, and save some of them. If their casting away, you see, means reconciliation for the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?45
I do not think that Paul is here attempting, as it were, to tie God’s hands. He is not saying what exactly will happen or when. He is not even saying, “You in Rome must evangelize your local synagogue members”—though his opening statement in the letter, that the gospel is “for the Jew first, and also, equally, for the Greek,” presumably means that when he arrives in Rome, he intends to follow his usual pattern and that, assuming there are Jewish communities in Spain, he will do so there as well. He is saying that Jews are always to be part of God’s faithful family and that God can and will bring “some of them” to that faith.46 But the point, as throughout Romans, is the faithfulness of God. God has been loyal to what he had promised. The messianic pattern now etched into history shows that “God has shut up all people in disobedience, so that he may have mercy upon all.”47 If the Roman church can hold on to that, they will be able to live with the true messianic mystery.
The final section of Romans, chapters 12–16, opens with broad general instructions about communal and individual life for the church, starting with a theme we know to be dear to Paul’s heart: Paul wants them to learn to worship the true God with their whole selves and to that end learn to think as people who live in the new world. “Be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you can work out what God’s will is, what is good, acceptable, and complete.”48 As so often in Paul, the general exhortations home in finally on love, balanced by the bracing ethic, consistent across all Paul’s writings, of living now in the light of the day that has already dawned and will one day dawn completely.49 Framed within that is the short but important reminder of the normal Jewish view of civic authorities.50 A robust monotheism knows that the Creator wants there to be such authorities, and they are themselves responsible, whether they know it or not, to God himself. The gospel does not sanction the apolitical spirituality of gnosis, nor does it sanction the one-dimensional revolution for which many of Paul’s countrymen were even then preparing. He does not want the Jesus movement to be confused with the zealotry of Jerusalem. That shallow “loyalty,” to say it again, was “not based on knowledge.”51 The Christians in Rome had to grow up in their thinking beyond those disastrous reductionisms.
This paves the way for the central point of the final section, which is Paul’s appeal for unity within the scattered and quite possibly mutually suspicious churches in Rome. It is noticeable that right up to the end of this section (14:1–15:13) he does not mention the underlying problem: that some of the house-churches are Jewish and some are Gentile. (Of course, things may well have been more complicated than that. Some of the Gentile Christians may, like some in Galatia, have been eager to take on the Jewish Torah; some of the Jewish Christians may, like Paul himself, have embraced what he calls the “strong” position.) But Paul will not address the questions in those terms. “Some of us prefer to do this . . . some of us prefer to do that,” he says.
He wants the members of the Roman churches to respect one another across these differences. (We note, to ward off a very different problem in today’s contemporary Western churches, that this supposed “tolerance” does not extend to all areas of behavior, as the closing lines of chapter 13 and the equivalent sections of other letters make abundantly clear.) And, once again, he reminds them they are living out the pattern of the Messiah. The death and resurrection of Jesus is, for Paul, not simply a historical reality that has created a new situation, but a pattern that must be woven into every aspect of church life. For Paul, what matters is the life of praise and worship that now, in the spirit, couples Jesus with God the father himself. This is the worship that, when united across traditional barriers, will shake Caesar’s ideology to its foundations:
Whatever was written ahead of time, you see, was written for us to learn from, so that through patience, and through the encouragement of the Bible, we might have hope. May the God of patience and encouragement grant you to come to a common mind among yourselves, in accordance with the Messiah, Jesus, so that, with one mind and one mouth, you may glorify the God and father of our Lord Jesus the Messiah.52
The letter closes with travel plans, reflecting on Paul’s mission across the eastern Mediterranean lands. “From Jerusalem around as far as Illyricum,” he says;53 Illyricum, northwest of Thessalonica, is not mentioned in Acts or even hinted at elsewhere in his letters, though Acts says more generally “he went through those regions,”54 which might easily include northwest Greece. Central to those travel plans is the journey he is about to take to Jerusalem, bringing the collection. He asks the Roman Jesus-followers to pray for safety and that his “service for Jerusalem may be welcomed gladly by God’s people.”55 A hint, in other words, of new anxieties just around the corner.
Phoebe, then, will travel west with the letter, while he will travel east with the money. He greets around thirty people in Rome—covering the bases, we may suppose, of all the different house-churches—and sends greetings from eight friends, including “Erastus the city treasurer” and “I, Tertius, the scribe for this letter.”56 We may detect a sigh of relief from Tertius, for whom the previous hours would have been demanding in more ways than one.
There is a final warning against people who cause division and problems and then a closing benediction,57 which goes on and on a bit like the end of a Beethoven symphony. At last the letter is done. It is one of the most ecstatic and exhilarating, dense and difficult, intellectually and spiritually challenging, and rewarding writings from any period of church history and, some might argue, from anybody else’s history as well.